We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.

Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]

Can the UK have a tech industry?

UK government tech policy must become libertarian, writes Preston Byrne.

The government wants to boss tech companies around, but it might not get its way any more, because the market is small, tech companies are mobile, and:

…the permanent bureaucracy in the United States which might otherwise have helped the UK apply informal pressure on Americans who dared to disobey its decryption and censorship edicts – none of which, it bears mentioning, are enforceable against an American who refuses them and is happy to avoid setting foot in British territory – is gone.

We should adapt.

If the UK chooses to be the worst place for an AI company, or a social media company, or a digital asset company to incorporate and do business, it will find that it has very few such companies. Regardless of your opinions on how British society should be structured, the NHS, immigration, or the appropriate quantum of social welfare, if you don’t have high tech employers generating revenues and paying taxes, social programs become very difficult to pay for.

Will we get a government capable of making this realisation? Or will we continue to self-destruct?

“Blasphemy laws are incompatible with free speech”

“Blasphemy laws are incompatible with free speech”, writes Tom Harris in the Telegraph.

The Government is known to disapprove of the term “two-tier”, especially when applied to policing, in which case, says a recent Home Office report, it can be a telltale sign that you’re of the “far-Right”. Isn’t everything?

I shouldn’t have laughed at that, but I did.

Yet in the last few days we’ve had a perfect example of how our laws are written to be, and correctly interpreted by judges as, two-tier, meaning that they are laws intended to offer different levels of protection and punishment to different groups of UK residents, depending on their faith or ethnic origin.

Martin Frost of Manchester chose (ill-advisedly, I might add) to burn a copy of the Koran in public, live streaming the event, in response to his daughter’s death at the hands of Hamas terrorists on October 7, 2023.

It is notable how many media outlets skated over the fact that Hamas murdered Martin Frost’s daughter. You might think the Telegraph’s phrasing (“her death at the hands of Hamas terrorists”) was mealy-mouthed enough, but just compare it to this ITV report that said,

The “trigger” for his actions was the death of his daughter in the Israeli conflict which had affected his mental health, the court heard.

Note the scare quotes around the word “trigger”, the words “the death of” as if she died a natural or accidental death, and the reference to it occurring in “the Israeli conflict”. Not the Hamas conflict, not the Gaza conflict, not even the Israel-Palestine conflict, but the Israeli conflict.

Tom Harris’s article continues,

He [Martin Frost] claimed also to have been protesting at the murder of Iraqi asylum seeker Salwan Momika who was murdered in his apartment in Stockholm after he performed his own act of Koran burning for his internet audience.

Forst [sic] pleaded guilty to charge of “racially or religiously aggravated intentional harassment or alarm by displaying some writing, sign or other visible representation which was threatening, abusive or insulting thereby causing that or another person harassment, alarm or distress.” That charge is contained in the text of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, introduced by Tony Blair’s government.

The old blasphemy laws may have been consigned to history decades ago, but they were replaced in 1998 by new ones: it is widely accepted that Muslims take very seriously the physical abuse of their religion’s holy book and are known to feel personally offended by any disrespect shown towards it. Similarly, most Muslims also take personal offence at any physical representation of the prophet Mohammed, hence the outcry against the teacher at Batley Grammar in 2021 who did exactly that by showing his pupils a cartoon depicting Islam’s founder.

That teacher is still in hiding.

In modern Britain, Islam and the Koran are protected by the law, by the courts and by the police. Christianity is not. That is not an argument that Christianity should receive equal protection; it is an argument that Islam should receive the same level of legal respect and protection as Christianity – ie, none. Two-tier protection is unacceptable because it equates to two-tier freedom of expression, freedom to criticise one religion but not a different one.

Yes. To forestall criticism that just saying “Yes” adds little of value, I shall try to give better value by amending it to “YES, YES, YES!!!”

We can imagine the horror that police officers, court officials and politicians must have felt when legal proceedings didn’t go their way in the case of Jamie Michael, an ex-Royal Marine who had served his country in Iraq but whose anger at the Southport murders of three young girls last summer led him to upload an ill-advised rant against illegal immigrants that a member of staff working for a Labour MS (Member of the Senedd) felt so offended that they just had to report it to the police.

I would not have guessed that someone working for a Labour member of the Welsh Government actually did have something worse to do with their time than their day job.

A jury took less than an hour of deliberation to acquit him.

The terms Mr Michael used were obnoxious and unpleasant. But as the jury agreed, that should not impinge on his right to free speech.

Juries often do things like that, even now. That’s why “Progressives” keep whittling away at the jury system: “Former Justice Secretary calls for scrapping of defendants’ right to choose jury trial.”

Deep State Götterdämmerung?

Naturally, the press has echoed the Deep State. “This is a hostile takeover of the federal government by a private citizen of unlimited means with no restrictions and no transparency,” said Kara Swisher of a man presently working for the democratically-elected president of our country, following his orders directly, and who at any moment can be (and ultimately almost certainly will be, let’s be honest) fired. “It’s a coup,” said Lindsay Owens of Groundwork (some kind of tedious, commie, dark money think tank), which was echoed throughout the press. “…what’s going on right now really is a genuine crisis,” said Jesse Singal, “and it should be recognized as such.”

But a crisis for who? I don’t share politics with the Deep State, and am not a huge fan of permanent, unelected, unaccountable power in general, so maybe this is hitting me different. In any case, I’ve been wondering: where is this level of “crisis” reporting on the president’s flurry of trans orders? His dismantling of DEI? The trade war (already mostly over, by the way) or Panama (also basically handled now, but I digress). With the exception of Selena Gomez, I haven’t seen many tears for deported violent criminals, something we heard a lot about back before the election. No, panic is almost entirely focused on saving federal bureaucrats. Why?

Mike Solana

Samzidata quote of the day – voice coach challenge edition

“Imagine being Keir Starmer’s voice coach. It’s like being David Lammy’s academic advisor or Bridget Phillipson’s charm consultant.”

Madeleine Grant.

(For those who don’t – wisely perhaps – follow UK domestic politics, David Lammy is Foreign Secretary, and Phillipson is Education minister. Both are dreadful and therefore classic front-bench ministers in this administration.)

Samizdata thought for the day

Religious toleration only came about when religion ceased to be a threat to the state.

Trump’s tariffs and his zero-sum approach to economics and trade

“Mr. Trump sometimes sounds as if the U.S. shouldn’t import anything at all, that America can be a perfectly closed economy making everything at home. This is called autarky, and it isn’t the world we live in, or one that we should want to live in, as Mr. Trump may soon find out.”

Wall Street Journal (£)

I think this post is going to annoy Trump defenders, and of course he’s done a few things (shutting DEI down in schools and so on) that I applaud. But this is not the time for whataboutery when considering how terrible Biden was and Harris would have been, as they were and would have been. Those talking points have their place, but now Mr Trump is in office. He’s the President for the next four years.

So there’s no way to finesse this. Tariffs are a form of self-harm, and the reasons given in this particular case shows they are seen as clubs to hit countries with in order to make them change this or that policy. It creates uncertainty, hits inward investment and domestic activity. Domestic and global economic growth will be reduced from where it might have been. Tariffs are taxes, however hard one might try and spin that fact away. Since Adam Smith pointed this all out 250-plus years ago, the damaging impact of tariffs have been widely understood.  

Tariffs, particularly given how they been justified and enacted, are a grave mistake by Mr Trump. Trying to claim that the US hit economic heights when tariffs existed in the late 19th century is another case of correlation and causation getting all blurred. The US in the post-Civil War era was a low-tax place: no federal income tax, no Fed, hardly much of a Welfare State as we’d call it, immense inflow of immigrants from places such as Russia, Germany, Italy, Sweden, etc. (Because there was little state welfare, such folk had to work their backsides off, and they did.) Here is an essay that in my view debunks the idea that the post-Civil War tariffs were a good idea.

There are facts that might be a puzzle, but not when you consider that Mr Trump loves tariffs even because they are a weapon. That’s what gets him out of bed in the morning, sometimes for good causes, often not. But the economic rationale is even worse when you consider that American energy costs, thanks to all that fracking he’s in favour of (a plus for him, in my view) means American manufacturing in some ways has a big competitive advantage on Europe, which self-harms because of Net Zero, red tape and high taxation.

Here is an essay I came across via social media and I think it is worth a read:

“I’m going to get a little wonky and write about Donald Trump and negotiations. For those who don’t know, I’m an adjunct professor at Indiana University – Robert H. McKinney School of Law and I teach negotiations. Okay, here goes.

Trump, as most of us know, is the credited author of “The Art of the Deal,” a book that was actually ghost written by a man named Tony Schwartz, who was given access to Trump and wrote based upon his observations. If you’ve read The Art of the Deal, or if you’ve followed Trump lately, you’ll know, even if you didn’t know the label, that he sees all dealmaking as what we call “distributive bargaining.”

Distributive bargaining always has a winner and a loser. It happens when there is a fixed quantity of something and two sides are fighting over how it gets distributed. Think of it as a pie and you’re fighting over who gets how many pieces. In Trump’s world, the bargaining was for a building, or for construction work, or subcontractors. He perceives a successful bargain as one in which there is a winner and a loser, so if he pays less than the seller wants, he wins. The more he saves the more he wins.

The other type of bargaining is called integrative bargaining. In integrative bargaining the two sides don’t have a complete conflict of interest, and it is possible to reach mutually beneficial agreements. Think of it, not a single pie to be divided by two hungry people, but as a baker and a caterer negotiating over how many pies will be baked at what prices, and the nature of their ongoing relationship after this one gig is over.

The problem with Trump is that he sees only distributive bargaining in an international world that requires integrative bargaining. He can raise tariffs, but so can other countries. He can’t demand they not respond. There is no defined end to the negotiation and there is no simple winner and loser. There are always more pies to be baked. Further, negotiations aren’t binary.

China’s choices aren’t (a) buy soybeans from US farmers, or (b) don’t buy soybeans. They can also (c) buy soybeans from Russia, or Argentina, or Brazil, or Canada, etc. That completely strips the distributive bargainer of his power to win or lose, to control the negotiation.

One of the risks of distributive bargaining is bad will. In a one-time distributive bargain, e.g. negotiating with the cabinet maker in your casino about whether you’re going to pay his whole bill or demand a discount, you don’t have to worry about your ongoing credibility or the next deal. If you do that to the cabinet maker, you can bet he won’t agree to do the cabinets in your next casino, and you’re going to have to find another cabinet maker.

There isn’t another Canada.

So when you approach international negotiation, in a world as complex as ours, with integrated economies and multiple buyers and sellers, you simply must approach them through integrative bargaining. If you attempt distributive bargaining, success is impossible. And we see that already.

Trump has raised tariffs on China. China responded, in addition to raising tariffs on US goods, by dropping all its soybean orders from the US and buying them from Russia. The effect is not only to cause tremendous harm to US farmers, but also to increase Russian revenue, making Russia less susceptible to sanctions and boycotts, increasing its economic and political power in the world, and reducing ours. Trump saw steel and aluminum and thought it would be an easy win, BECAUSE HE SAW ONLY STEEL AND ALUMINUM – HE SEES EVERY NEGOTIATION AS DISTRIBUTIVE. China saw it as integrative, and integrated Russia and its soybean purchase orders into a far more complex negotiation ecosystem.

Trump has the same weakness politically. For every winner there must be a loser. And that’s just not how politics works, not over the long run.

For people who study negotiations, this is incredibly basic stuff, negotiations 101, definitions you learn before you even start talking about styles and tactics. And here’s another huge problem for us.

Trump is utterly convinced that his experience in a closely held real estate company has prepared him to run a nation, and therefore he rejects the advice of people who spent entire careers studying the nuances of international negotiations and diplomacy. But the leaders on the other side of the table have not eschewed expertise, they have embraced it. And that means they look at Trump and, given his very limited tool chest and his blindly distributive understanding of negotiation, they know exactly what he is going to do and exactly how to respond to it.

From a professional negotiation point of view, Trump isn’t even bringing checkers to a chess match. He’s bringing a quarter that he insists of flipping for heads or tails, while everybody else is studying the chess board to decide whether its better to open with Najdorf or Grünfeld.”

— David Honig

So there you have it. A bad idea having a damaging impact. Is Mr Trump playing 4-D chess with us all, as his defenders and explainers (including those who consider themselves pro-capitalism seem to be doing in some places that I see on social media), or is this in fact a big error that will eventually hurt America and the freer bits of the world? My worry is that history tells us that, with exceptions, tariff clashes tend to go wrong, lead to slower growth, and even nastier conflicts. It may be that Mr Trump is cleverer than we can appreciate, but I am sceptical.

Not a good start to his time in office. May wiser heads prevail, as they say.

Update: Here is a good article today (4 January) from Daniel Freeman at CapX on how, in his view, Mr Trump has misread the causes of America’s ascent as a business powerhouse.

Trade for beginners

  1. Trade makes everyone richer.
  2. Tariffs make the country applying them poorer.
  3. The fact that the US government is doing something stupid does not mean you have to join them.

Samizdata quote of the day – an accurate but unedifying image for you

The British economy is lying flat on its back in an alleyway with wee dribbling down its leg.

Rod Liddle (£)

“Is Israel Weaponizing the Tragic Deaths of the Bibas Children?”

“Is Israel Weaponizing the Tragic Deaths of the Bibas Children?”

Dear God. I don’t know where to start.

Is
Israel
Weaponizing the Tragic Deaths of the Bibas Children?

Is Israel
Weaponizing
the Tragic Deaths of the Bibas Children?

Is Israel Weaponizing the
Tragic Deaths
of the Bibas Children?

The children.

The tweet is by Mehdi Hasan, quoting Muhammad Shehada, who describes himself as a “Gazan Political Analyst & Writer.” Mehdi Hasan is a former senior political editor at the New Statesman and is the author of a book called Win Every Argument.

In Sweden – ‘We are all guilty’ say the police (paraphrasing).

Officers of the Swedish Police have made an announcement regarding the 30 or so bombings in the country in January 2025, attributed to extortion of businesses by criminal gangs, and have said that they can’t cope and they need all of society to mobilise to help them. However, they don’t appear to say how this should be done, or what with, so there might be some misinterpretation and I don’t think that the posse is a thing in Sweden, reported by the independent, reader-funded Nordic Times.

Swedish Police: “Everyone must take responsibility for the bombings”

This puts me in mind of a character in The Daily Telegraph’s Peter Simple column, who, as a fore-runner of today’s DEI activists would roundly proclaim ‘We are all guilty!’, a chilling vision of the climate today.

However, coming back to Sweden, we are told:

– The whole society must be mobilized. Everyone must take responsibility and do even more, said Tobias Bergkvist, deputy regional police chief for Stockholm.

During a press conference on Wednesday, the police emphasized the urgency of the situation and the need to take action to stop the wave of violence.

– We have a very serious situation, not only in Stockholm but also nationally, Bergkvist emphasized.

The Nordic Times has its own take on the matter, citing, as the BBC would probably point out, ‘without evidence’ networks of immigrant criminals.

The police do not seem to have gone that far in terms of specificity:

– What we are seeing now is an escalation of violence, but also a change in the problem. The majority of the bombings we have suffered in December and January have rather financial incentives, are strategic acts targeting companies and often for extortion purposes, says Hampus Nygårds, Deputy Head of the National Operations Unit (NOA).

“Criminal ecosystem”
He explains that the purpose of the attacks is to intimidate business owners into paying to stop the threat.

– Money is demanded to stop the violence and threats.

The police describe how a “criminal ecosystem” has emerged, where the recruitment of new perpetrators has now moved to digital platforms. Young people are offered money to commit acts of violence – including murder.

But there is a plan, nothing so far like what appears to be happening in the USA, this is Sweden after all, but the plan is an increased digital presence of the police.

The police are now mobilizing, especially in Stockholm but also nationally. We are taking measures such as reinforcements from different police regions, Bergkvist explains.

An important part of the strategy is said to be to increase the police’s digital presence and competence and to focus more on identifying and stopping bomb makers before the explosions are carried out, but the police believe that crime prevention work cannot be done by the authorities alone.

Start by apologising, doctor.

“We are seeing anti-medical, anti-science narratives everywhere – how can doctors like me respond?”, writes Dr Mariam Tokhi in the Guardian. She starts with the heartrending story of an eight year old Australian girl called Elizabeth Struhs who died of diabetic ketoacidosis due to the withdrawal of the insulin she needed to live. Her family belong to a religious sect called “the Saints” that believes that medicine should not be used. Her father, mother and brother, alongside several other members of this sect, have been found guilty of her manslaughter. Dr Tokhi then writes,

I am seeing the rise of anti-medical, anti-science narratives everywhere. A patient in my clinic tells us that she has stopped her HIV antiviral tablets, because her pastor told her she has been healed by prayer. A parent rejects mental health treatment for his impulsive, suicidal teenager, telling me that ADHD and major depression are made-up, modern conditions. A pregnant mother asks me to sign her Advanced Care Directive, saying she declines blood products in the event of a life-threatening bleed during birth, worried that she could receive “vaccine-contaminated” blood. Another tells me she will “free-birth” without midwifery or medical care.

During the Covid pandemic, conspiracy theorists distributed junk maps of Covid-19 cases connecting them to 5G mobile phone towers. As a result, I spent countless hours doing community outreach, health promotion work and endless individual consultations trying to debunk pseudoscience and explaining (often unsuccessfully) the risk-benefit ratios of vaccines. In the last year, we have seen outbreaks of pertussis, measles, chickenpox, hepatitis and influenza, often linked to pockets of vaccine refusal.

Medical doctors and scientists now face a barrage of anti-science, anti-medicine narratives, and it feels like we are losing the battle. We are no longer trusted instinctively. So how do we engage with people who mistrust us?

It is a heartfelt piece. I don’t doubt her sincerity. My answer to her question is also heartfelt and sincere: start by admitting what you, the doctors and the medical profession as a whole, did to lose so much trust.

Remember how so many of you said that complete social isolation was vital for the duration of the pandemic except for those attending Black Lives Matter protests? Remember how distinguished doctors, epidemiologists and virologists were denounced when they said that, for much of the population, the risk of harm from Covid-19 was less than the risk of harm from lockdown? Remember how you declared the theory that the Covid-19 coronavirus strain came from a laboratory leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology was a racist conspiracy theory, and cheered when Facebook deleted posts that discussed it? Remember how you self-censored discussion even among yourselves of the side effects that the Covid vaccines, like all vaccines, have – thus degrading the system of reporting adverse reactions that was once universally understood to be a vital tool to improve the safety of medicines?

For the record, I have taken every vaccine offered to me, including the Pfizer and the Astra Zeneca Covid-19 vaccines, and I am happy with that decision. But the unquestioning faith I once had that I would be given all relevant information before I chose to accept any medical procedure has gone. Some of it departed alongside the faith that I would be given a choice at all. Such faith as I now have in the medical profession as a whole is in its residual ethics. Most doctors were trained in better times, and according to better precepts. I trust old doctors more than young doctors. Lest I offend any young doctors reading this, that’s still quite a lot of trust. It’s not that I think any significant number of doctors set out to harm people. It’s that I do think a significant number of doctors refused to consider many serious and well-founded policy and treatment proposals regarding Covid on no better grounds than that they might have helped Donald Trump’s electoral chances, and an even larger number never even got to hear about such proposals in the first place, except at second hand as the ravings of folk in tinfoil hats. These proposals were not necessarily correct. But excluding them from discussion for political reasons gnawed away at the edifice of trust in medicine.

And the gnawing persists. When termites infest a property, they eat the walls from inside, so that if you tap the walls they sound hollow. If all else is quiet you can even hear the rustle of tiny jaws directly. That is a metaphor for how millions of people feel about the house of medicine now: not that it has fallen down with a crash – it is still their shelter – but that the walls have hollow patches and that sometimes one hears a soft scratching noise . . . and if you tell the owners of the house about it, they say you are imagining things or just trying to make trouble.

The Guardian‘s (pre-moderated) comments burn with outrage at the medical misinformation that comes from religious people and right-wingers. At medical misinformation coming from left-wing New Age practitioners, not so much; and at medical misinformation coming from the medical profession itself and enforced by censorship, none at all. Maybe some comments that pointed out that the medical establishment itself had some responsibility for the loss of public trust in medicine were made, but the Guardian censored them so we’ll never know what they said.

Instead of trying to boost the *grades* of minority students, why not try boosting their achievement?

“Oxford and Cambridge to move away from ‘traditional’ exams to boost results of minorities”, the Telegraph reports.

Top universities including Oxford and Cambridge have been given the green light to move away from “traditional” exams in a bid to boost the grades of minority groups and poorer students.

The elite British institutions could move towards more “inclusive assessments” such as open-book tests or take-home papers instead of in-person, unseen exams in an effort to close the grades gap.

However, the plans have been criticised for potentially “dumbing down” university courses for students.

The approach was unveiled under proposals, known as Access and Participation Plans, which universities must release each year as per their registration conditions to show how they are helping students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

As Katharine Birbalsingh – the head teacher of a very successful school most of whose pupils are from ethnic minorities – said, the idea that black and brown people cannot achieve unless we make exams easier is “utterly revolting racism”. For most of a lifetime, the educational establishment in the English-speaking world has been assiduous in keeping pupils from those groups they consider to be oppressed safe from the momentarily unpleasant experience of being corrected. No tests they might fail, no red ink on their work. Even the idea of the existence of objectively correct answers has been denounced, lest someone oppressed get the wrong answer and feel bad. With equal care, they are protected from ever seeing someone less oppressed get a better score than they did. The upshot has that these pupils have been kept safe from education.

Education should be a pleasant experience overall. Human beings, especially young human beings, love to learn. But in their own games, or when learning a subject they truly want to master, children do not flinch from putting themselves in positions where they might fail. They instinctively know that the route to success involves climbing over some jagged rocks. Unfortunately for most of my lifetime kindly teachers across the English-speaking world have striven to keep all children, but especially black and brown children, on the soft grass where nothing can hurt them – forever. Almost the only place in school where these children experience public failure is on the sports ground. Not surprisingly, sport is one of the few areas where disadvantaged children frequently grow up to succeed.

First it was just the kindergartens and the infant schools where the wee ones had to be kept happy all the time. Then it spread to secondary schools. Now the sweet-smelling fog has reached the colleges and the universities, where the students are – chronologically at least – adults.